"if it's good news, it must be someone else's"

Monday, July 27, 2009

931. the brothers crane at sea

it all came together quite quickly, a fishing outing on barnegat bay in steve's newly purchased boat.
the four brothers crane.
at sea.
on a collective experience of three hours.
mine: dingy boy on a rented yacht during a keaton family cruise around the caribbean.
doug's: watching the b-movie, "blackbeard the pirate" about a hundred times.
rick's: owns a small row boat that requires a 10 hp electric motor to putt around in.
and steve (the only one with a boating license): his recent boating exam and the five mile ride from the boat's previous owner's slip to his slip.
that should have been cause enough to put this whole operation on hold for a couple of more years.
but it didn't.
we went anyway.

a few sandbar near hits and channel marker misses later, and we were fishing like eskimo whalers.
and what do the brothers crane talk about when the only distraction is the occasional smirk of a passing gull or the sudden tug on the line by playful seaweed?
conquests of the heart?
wild port-of-call high jinks?
no!
the brothers crane repeat every classic line from every curb your enthusiasm episode ever broadcasted about forty or fifty times.
hours and hours of endless dialogue, laughing our fool heads off as we drifted about the bay in bawdy banter and carefree ignorance.

we all caught a fish too, mostly summer flounder.
even doug, although he snagged something called a skate, a prehistoric looking affair that quite frankly doesn't look anymore like a fish than "catfish" harley buttress up the street.

a few hours, coronas, lost hats, and basil cell carcinomas later, we safely landed our boat back in the slip to the angst and relief of neighboring yacht owners, our empty ribald tales of maiden conquering left adrift on the placid gray-green waters, like all stories told at sea.
for if the brothers crane are anything, we are pirates at heart, needing only a good ale and the soft warmth of a fair lady's touch to temper our zest for plunder.
a raucous brood we are me matey!

(or so we'd like to believe anyway.)

4 comments:

Pam said...

Sounds like a great time...all that male bonding and testoserone floating around on the bay...making happy family memories.

Pam said...

Oops, I left out the "t" in testosterone. Gotta be careful of that. Could change the whole DNA of things.

dos said...

Bob, I like this entry best. But did you guys really catch a fish or discuss anything besides helath issues?

Robert Crane said...

dos, kinda like both at the same time. we caught fish that we figured must have health issues or we wouldn't have caught them.